Gender roles

Mr. Moms get little respect

Jode Roberts
took parental leave from his job after Jasper was born because his wife,
Carol, was self-employed and couldn’t get the benefit.

While staying home to look after the kids is a
choice more men are making, they still encounter static from family, friends
– and wives

ZOSIA BIELSKI

From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published on Thursday, Mar. 25, 2010

Ababy on his hip, Michael Laffont
kisses his wife as she leaves for the office in a crisp power suit. Then, to
the horror of the hired help, he starts poking around the kitchen to get a
head start on dinner.

Cooking with Stella, the new
film co-written by siblings Deepa Mehta and Dilip Mehta,
centres on the tensions that remain around the househusband.
Michael (played by Don McKellar) is a self-described “diplomatic housewife.”
He's put his career as a chef on hold for his wife, a diplomat who has
relocated the family to New Delhi from Canada.

At the diplomatic compound, Michael jogs past other men as they go to
work. At home, Stella, the family's Indian cook, gossips about the household
going “topsy-turvy.”

“Madam going to office; sir only mothering,” she says.

The couple's fights are sharper. “Just because you don't have job
satisfaction doesn't mean you have to be an asshole,” snaps Maya, Michael's
wife. “You have job satisfaction because this asshole agreed not to,” he
snaps back.

Fresh off the heels of an economic downturn that has hit men harder than
women, househusband is a position in which men are increasingly finding
themselves.

In January, a report from the Pew Research Centre found that women are
outpacing men in education and earnings growth: In 2007, 22 per cent of
husbands were out-earned by their wives, up from 4 per cent in 1970. The
authors write that these changes are being accompanied by a slow reversal of
gender roles, one experts say can cause friction in couples as they iron out
domestic kinks and deal with the nuanced judgment of traditionally minded
outsiders peering in on their lives.

Jode Roberts detected a “subtle jealousy” from several other fathers
during the nine months he spent at home with his son Jasper in Toronto.

“I think there's resentment or sadness that they can't be hanging out
with their kids, that they have to work each day while I get to spend the
entire day hanging out with the kid.”

Mr. Roberts, 38, took parental leave because his wife, Carol, a
self-employed contractor, wasn’t eligible for employment insurance-funded
benefits. Leaving his job at an environmental law organization, Mr. Roberts
was soon in charge of “everything except for breastfeeding.” He even
attended a mommies’ group. (He was the only guy there.)

“I actually aspire to be a househusband. Truth be told, if I could drop
my job and just hang out at home all the time, I probably would,” Mr.
Roberts said.

He acknowledges there was some “tension” with his wife, mostly because
“she’s squirrelled away in the basement trying to tend to her work while I’m
having fun playing upstairs with the boy.”

For Jeff and Alyson Pain of Calgary, most of the relationship strain grew
around domestic control.

Having spent many years away, training and competing in skeleton, Mr.
Pain is now home with sons Kyle, 8, and Thomas, 6, after racing in this
year’s Winter Olympics –his third and last.

On her blog, Ms. Pain, a team and relationships coach, writes of their
domestic and financial transition as “a holy crap gap,” one the couple is
trying to bridge with a co-written book, The Business of Marriage and
Medals, published last week.

While his wife sees clients, Mr. Pain, 39, takes the boys to the bus stop
in the morning and to tae kwon do and the skate park after school. He also
cooks dinners and does laundry.

“It’s harder for me to let go,” said Ms. Pain of the routines she is used
to performing.

More than children, house chores are often the source of discord among
“reverse traditional” families, said Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco-based
author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and
Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.

“It is the case that the homes of many stay-at-home dads are messier than
the homes of many stay-at-homes moms,” said Mr. Smith, adding it’s because
“men don’t feel judged by their houses.”

“The dads I interviewed, when I went into their homes, they didn’t care
if there was a shirt on the floor. They didn’t feel like I was going to
judge them for that, and I didn’t.”

House chores weren’t a problem for Mr. Smith, who spent a year at home
with his son Liko after his wife Olli went back to teaching in 2005. (“I’m
cleaner than my wife,” he said.)

Mr. Smith decided to write the book after a relative sent the entire
family an e-mail “expressing her disapproval for me being [Liko’s] primary
caregiver and not going back to work.”

Suzanne Riss, editor-in-chief of Working Mother magazine, said that even
if a househusband does the job well, “it’s not as though everyone is going
to look at them with great admiration.”

“There’s the whole issue of how are all the relatives looking at it, what
do the in-laws think, what do the neighbours think,” she said. “There’s a
lot of societal pressure when people are doing things in a way that their
own parents didn’t.”

That includes tacit suggestions to job hunt, said Frank Duff, a writer
who lives in Philadelphia with his wife Erika, who works as an exhibit
prototyper.

“From time to time, someone on one side of the family or another will ask
me if I’m looking for work,” said Mr. Duff, who grew up in Ontario.

“If the right thing came up, I’d take it. But I really don’t feel like
this is a situation that warrants looking too hard for a way out of.
Househusband is a good gig.”

Before the couple’s daughter Freya was born three weeks ago, Mr. Duff’s
routine went like this: As his wife showered, he made breakfast and packed
her a lunch; during the day he’d run errands and write, then start on
dinner.

Now, all three are at home, “just learning to be a family.”

“We each do our part and it doesn’t matter at all to us whether those
parts are equal. We’re just happy to be together.”

Mr. Smith said that’s one thing couples often forget: to be grateful they
have each other, in any capacity. “Many couples can’t. They can’t articulate
what they’re gaining.”

Making it work

House husbands may be a growing breed, but the role reversal can spark
resentment when the socks aren’t paired up right. Experts offer their tips
to avoid shattered nerves:

Hand over the spatula

“A lot of working moms can be controlling about these things. You do need
to give up control,” said Suzanne Riss, editor-in-chief of Working Mother
magazine. “He may not do laundry or load the dishwasher the way you do it.
You have to recognize that this is a different person - he’s going to do
things differently. Let him find his way and do it the way he’s
comfortable.”

Avoid dictator-speak

“Sit down and discuss what needs to be done together and decide who
should do what, so it’s not like one person is ordering the other around,”
Ms. Riss said.

Daddy in the deep end

“I often get asked how can women get fathers to do more?” said Jeremy
Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift. “I’m like, ‘Walk away.’ “

Say it to his face

“Instead of behaving in a way that’s passive-aggressive and snitty, and
talking dirt about

your spouse behind their back with your girlfriends, it’s much better to
go to your spouse and say, ‘Honey, this is driving me crazy,’ “ Mr. Smith
said.

“I found it was very important for the wife to appreciate what she was
able to get in being able to focus on her career,” said Mr. Smith.
“Likewise, the father needs to be able to say those things, too. Say it
aloud – don’t hide it away.”

Sounds great in theory, practice is entirely different and fraught with
extreme if not deadly risks.

First, 50% of marriages go sour, and its women who generally pull the pin,
become bitter that "they do all the work, make all the money" while that dead
beat stays home with the child/ren.

She ends up with all the money, he has none, she goes to court armed with a high
priced lawyer while he, is self represented.

Increasingly men, sacrifice their careers for their wives, who gain incredible
advantages while his qualifications lapse, his experience becomes worthless and
becomes virtually unemployable.

You would think that men who sacrifice everything so their female wives could
gain a career advantage would be respected.

Not so.

In Ontario, legal commentators point out, in very blunt language that the
Ontario Judiciary do not apply the law equally to both genders.

Any male who asks for Spousal Support is treated as someone who is "off their
rocker", he must have a few screws loose", "how dare he ask for support from a
woman".

No matter how meritorious the claim may be, there is hardly a judge in Ontario
who will give a man spousal support.

He will get hit with "an order for costs", an outragious draconian order that he
cannot pay.
It is effectively "a fine" for asking for spousal support.

That "fine" also prevents him from litigating anything like custody, let alone
access.

The underbellies of the judiciary, the real child abusers of Ontario, like
Sheffield, Power, Desousa, Robertson, will make sure he has his pleadings
struck, an order for security for costs surely follows as does an eventual order
that he is a vexatious litigant.

To top it off, he stands a 50% chance of being arrested, if not repeatedly
arrested on trumped up criminal charges that generally almost allways are
dropped before trial but not before the criminal charges do their desired
damage.